CONCLUSION

Drawing conclusions when writing about television is a seemingly impossible task. It eludes any comprehensive overview. Its ubiquity can only be viewed from a very limited perspective and its open-ended flow makes conclusions inevitably provisional. This book is best understood in the same way as the programmes it has been discussing; that is, in relation to the time and place of its production and within the limits of selection produced by my own interests and purposes and the imagined audience I have in mind. My background in feminist cultural studies has been the primary influence on this; as someone who first engaged with feminist ideas through their portrayal in film and television I am interested in how cultural identity is discursively formed through popular culture. With this in mind I have demonstrated how, in the cases selected, the portrayal of sexuality can be shown to have resulted from the discursive context in which the programme has been made — the sexual norms, codes of taste and decency, genre conventions and hierarchies of taste that regulate what can be said or shown. These discourses are mobilized in the attempts by television companies to address a varied range of consumer-citizens with differentiated aesthetic tastes, political con­victions, moral beliefs and sexual identities that will affect their orientations towards sexual portrayal. There is no exact fit between what is produced and how it is con­sumed but neither are they entirely disconnected. Both are selectively and reflexively formed in relation to the larger discursive context.